This Coimbatore Startup Wants To Make Smart-Homes Affordable To Everyone in India

Coimbatore-based Karsan technologies has decided to make every Indian home smarter than ever with its stellar debut product, Smitch.

Imagine a home which knows you better, understands you better and helps you save your hard-earned money by managing your electricity consumptions without you having to compromise and make changes in your lifestyle. Karsan technologies’ Smitch is a tiny WiFi enabled smart module which makes all this possible.

Launched with a mission of making every home in India a smart home by 2030, the extremely compact WiFi enabled smart module goes comfortably behind your switchboard and lets you control your lights, fan and electrical points right through your smartphone (mobile app) or voice (Amazon echo).

How Does It Work?

The Smitch modules has an in-built WiFi chip through which they directly connect to your existing router without requiring any external hub. This particular feature lets you control and monitor your home from anywhere in the world at anytime of the day/night. It meticulously monitors your energy consumption and then provides you with detailed analytics which can help you in cutting down your energy bills significantly.

What Makes Smitch Different From Other Home Automation Products?

Though Smitch faces tough competition in the market from products like Silvan, Oakter, Pert and Homebot etc., but the product holds on its own as unlike other home automation products, it doesn’t require a hub to function. This automatically helps in reducing the cost of automation significantly. Karsan technologies claims that Smitch is 30% more affordable than its competitors. In addition to this, Smitch is extremely compact and sits comfortably behind a user’s existing switchboard, which means it saves them the trouble of replacing their switchboards or rewiring their existing cables.

The Founders

Karsan technologies was started by two 19-year-old Robotics and Automation engineering students, Sanath Kumar and Pragadheesh Raj in August, 2015. The duo decided to give up the prospects of having cushiony jobs for their love for building products and automation. They decided to leap whole-heartedly into entrepreneurship after the completion of their degree. The duo already have a couple of patents under their names, both combined and individually.

The young duo already owns a patent under their name: Home Automation Controlled Both Manually And Remotely (Patent issuer and number in India 5554/CHE/2015).

Pragadheesh published his paper ‘Flexible Automation System for Industrial Transformer Testing’ in the ‘International Journal of Advanced Research in Electrical, Electronics and Instrumentation’.

Journey So Far

The startup, which received a whopping Rs.3 crores angel funding in December 2015 within a couple of months of its launch, now has over 400 homes in Coimbatore automated by Smitch. It is currently in the midst of locking in deals with several builders and property developers in Bengaluru, Chennai and Mumbai to be their one stop Home automation provider. With an average conversion rate of around 23 per cent, Smitch numbers have been phenomenal so far.

Plan Ahead

With Smitch already making its presence feel in metropolitan cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai and Chennai, Karsan technologies plans to expand the joy of affordable home automation to several other cities across India by the end of the 2017-18 FY.